Judith Gautier, Vers Libre, and the Faux East

ABSTRACT

Judith Gautier (1845–1917) is best known as muse to Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner. More recently, critics have started crediting her for bringing Asian culture to Parnassian-era Paris in her 1867 translations of Chinese poetry, Le Livre de jade. In most of her translations, Gautier adapted Chinese texts to suit personal and contemporary French poetic ideals, which were in turn appropriated by readers as models of Chinese ideals. Her poetic creations reveal an early modernist style, which is at once disorienting and familiarizing. This article reconsiders Gautier's translations to show how and why these adaptations replaced original Chinese sources for subsequent generations of modernist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Rexroth. Orientalist tendencies in these eminent poets are products of Gautier's subjective, gendered, and inventive interpretation of the East, shaped not only by the translations themselves but also by Gautier's ways of understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• Chinese poetry
• Judith Gautier
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• modernism
• Orientalism
• Ezra Pound
• Kenneth Rexroth
• symbolism
• translation

Notes on contributor

Andrea S. Thomas is Associate Professor of French at Loyola University Maryland. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Belgian literature and publishing history. She has published a monograph on the editions and reception of Lautréamont's works, Lautréamont, Subject to Interpretation, and is currently writing a book on the role of Belgian publishers during the Second French Empire.

Notes

1. The author wishes to thank Heidi Brown, Stamos Metzidakis, Leslie Zarker Morgan, Melissa Girard, and Jinghua Wangling, whose insights benefited the present article, as well as the journal's anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. The issue of collecting and bibelot culture in fin-de-siècle France is taken up by Janell Watson in Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. On the subject of japonisme in France, see Hokenson.

2. Similarly, according to traditional Chinese literary criticism, erotic literary works from the end of a dynasty were often considered decadent and associated with the declining of the dynasty.

3. In his Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, Hayot discusses the work of T. S. Eliot, Robert Kern, and Xiaomei Chen in this context. The cultural turn in the approach to translation was led by theorists such as Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, and Lawrence Venuti.

4. On Gautier's life, see Richardson's biography; on her works, see Yu (“Judith Gautier” and “Your Alabaster”), Brahimi, and Caws.

5. The notion of pseudotranslations was one first developed by Gideon Toury in his 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies—and Beyond and refers to translations that have no corresponding text in another language. Toury writes that pseudotranslations can often be used fruitfully to “divert from norms and traditions without arousing too much antagonism” and sometimes serve to legitimize an author (48). Both uses may in part explain the more original works in Gautier's Le Livre de jade.

6. Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1813 “On the Different Methods of Translating” also played an important role in the development of translation theory during the Romantic era. The metaphor of translation as movement from writer to reader or reader to writer comes from Schleiermacher's essay.

7. The terms “foreignization” and “domestication” come from concepts developed in Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. The sexist tendency to privilege “foreignizing” over “domesticating” has been taken up by Jane Gallop in “The Translation of Deconstruction.”

8. The idea that modernist translations strive for difference and destabilization comes from Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (76).

9. Bien argues that Baudelaire was influenced by Gautier's poem and not the inverse. This is impossible because Baudelaire's poem was first published years before Gautier's translation.

10. See chapter 14, “Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction” in Emily Apter's The Translation Zone.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea S. Thomas

Andrea S. Thomas is Associate Professor of French at Loyola University Maryland. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Belgian literature and publishing history. She has published a monograph on the editions and reception of Lautréamont's works, Lautréamont, Subject to Interpretation, and is currently writing a book on the role of Belgian publishers during the Second French Empire.